Corporate responsibility

These are some of the views and reports relevant to our readers that caught our attention this week.

Global Internet Report 2016Internet Society
Today we are at a defining moment in the evolution and growth of the Internet. Large-scale data breaches, uncertainties about the use of our data, cybercrime, surveillance and other online threats are eroding users’ trust and affecting how they use the Internet. Eroding trust is also affecting the way governments view the Internet, and, is shaping the policy environment for the Internet around the world. The 2016 Global Internet Report takes a close look at data breaches through an economic lens and provides five clear recommendations for a path forward.

What Does “Governance” Mean?Governance Journal
The normative goals of governance reform are twofold: more effective public policies, and procedures that are legitimate and accountable to the citizenry. Often the phrase “good governance” is intertwined with the anticorruption agenda. Drawing on the author's experience as a visiting researcher at the World Bank and as a scholar of both corruption and comparative politics, this essay unpacks the concept of governance and relates it to debates over ways to balance technical expertise and public participation to achieve better functioning governments.

It’s well understood that everyone has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everyone cheats— even if it’s just a little. Sometimes we fill our water cups with soda, we take the pens from the credit union, or we may speed when we’re running late. But what is going on when institutional deception, involving multiple people, occurs?

As most of us are now aware, Wells Fargo recently received a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Bureau of the United States after it was uncovered that its employees were engaging in illegal banking practices. This brought the bank's total bill for these infractions to $185 million and coincided with the firings of about 5,300 Wells Fargo employees. According to reports, the 5,300 employees who were allegedly involved secretly issued credit cards that customers never requested, set up fake bank accounts that resulted in customer fees, created fraudulent email accounts to sign up customers for additional services, and actually transferred customers' money between accounts— without permission.

Such an outrage might remind you of the Volkswagen scandal last year in which the German car manufacturer admitted that it had used sophisticated software to trick emissions regulators. If a car was being tested, the emissions controls would operate as they should, but if the car was not undergoing a test, the emissions controls would switch off, resulting in cars that emitted 40 times the legally sanctioned levels of air pollutants. Volkswagen has since has admitted that 11 million vehicles worldwide were equipped with the program that duped emission testing and had to recall a total of 8.5 million diesel vehicles in Europe alone.

How in the world did that many people get involved with such unscrupulous behavior? How could over 5,000 Wells Fargo employees engage in such obviously deceptive and fraudulent behavior? And how could so many Volkswagen employees, from software technicians to senior management, go along with blatantly circumventing the rules? How does a group of people end up lying together?

Once a concession agreement or any large-scale public procurement contract is signed, who can ensure that the terms are met? How to turn commitments into development on the ground? This is the puzzle that a mix of around 70 government, business and civil society leaders from West Africa began to solve this past week.

It has been argued that corruption cases are focused mostly on the offenders and retribution is calculated on material value. This leaves out the victims of corruption and the collective damage done to the society at large, especially when the malfeasance involves the misappropriation of public money. The concept of ‘social damage’ is an emerging concept in the anti-corruption movement, which seeks to identify, quantify, and repair the impact and consequences of corruption on ordinary citizens. It posits that citizens, as taxpayers, are entitled to a legal claim on public money and how it is spent because “every dollar lost in corruption is a dollar stolen from spending in education, social services, poverty reduction and job creation (Its Our Money)”.

One hears less about the base of the pyramid these days. Instead, "inclusive" remains the clear buzzword of choice for now. The recent UN Millennium Development Goals Summit generated a side workshop on Inclusive Business organized by a roll call of organizations. Now IFC is hosting its own event on Inclusive Business Solutions around the IMF/World Bank Annual Meetings this week. The term is pervasive.

The current blizzard conditions in Washington D.C. are testing World Bank staff capabilities to work remotely. Advances in technology no longer mean we have to shut up shop completely - though some no doubt lament the loss of the care free snow day of the past.

The passing of a decade provokes an inevitable reflection on the state of all things. Looking at the corporate responsibility (CSR) space, it has now been over 15 years since John Elkington coined the term triple bottom line. CSR has continued to be mainstreamed.

The global economic crisis revealed large scale fraud in the financial sector (witness the Madoff scandal, among others). Unsurprisingly, it has prompted widespread decline in public trust in companies. The Financial Times / Harris Poll released last month suggests three-quarters of people in the US and Europe now have a worse opinion of business.

Participants from the length of the agribusiness value chain are gathered at the Bank this week for the World Bank Institute’s new Executive Program on Inclusive Agribusiness: Fighting Poverty, Hunger and Malnutrition. Chris Delgado and John Lamb from the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development team set the scene on Tuesday morning by laying out the scale and complexity of the challenge facing the food sector. It was not a pretty picture.